501. Money, not morality, is the principle of commercial nations. – Thomas Jefferson

502. It is a socialist idea that making profits is a vice; I consider the real vice is making losses. – Winston Churchill

503. Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd, he at once becomes a blockhead. – Friedrich von Schiller

504. The real issue is control. The Internet is too widespread to be easily dominated by any single government. By creating a seamless global economic zone, anti-sovereign and unregulatable, the Internet calls into question the very idea of a nation-state. – John Perry Barlow

505. Capitalism without failure is like religion without sin. Bankruptcies and losses concentrate the mind on prudent behavior. – Allan H. Meltzer

506. You doubt that … your great country … is on the wane? I say only this – look around you. – Saint Griseus

507. In the United States we have, in effect, two governments … We have the duly constituted Government … Then we have an independent, uncontrolled and uncoordinated government in the Federal Reserve System, operating the money powers which are reserved to Congress by the Constitution. – Congressman Wright Patman

508. It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. – Henry Ford

509. Law! What do I care about the law? Ain’t I got the power? – Cornelius Vanderbilt

510. Does America really need 70 percent of the world’s lawyers? … Is it healthy for our economy to have 18 million lawsuits coursing through our system annually? – Dan Quayle August 13, 1991

511. Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. – Martin Luther King Jr.

512. If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected – those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most! – and listens to their testimony. – James Baldwin, African-American Author, “No Name in the Street”

513. … the next revolution … will be when those who work refuse to support those who don’t. – Walter Hickel

514. The standard of living of the common man is higher in those countries which have the greatest number of wealthy entrepreneurs. – Ludwig von Mises

515. There are two kinds of people – those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group, there is less competition there. – Indira Gandhi

516. Political elections do not choose leaders of society. Rather, they are an exercise in which groups of people choose individuals who will assist them in looting other groups of individuals, those folks who were unfortunate enough not to be able to elect their own political strongman. The process can be downright blatant, as is the case in African and Asian countries, or it can be relatively subtle as it is in the United States, where the trappings of “constitutionality” and “rule of law” hide many of the more nefarious goings on. – William Anderson, Are Politicians Leaders? 10/19/2000

517. Our two-party system is a fraud, a sham, a delusion. On foreign policy, trade, immigration, Big Government, we have one-party government, one party press; and conservatives are being played for suckers. – Patrick J Buchanan

519. Powerful government tends to draw into it people with bloated egos, people who think they know more than everyone else and have little hesitance in coercing their fellow man. Or as Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek said, “in government, the scum rises to the top”. – Walter E. Williams

520. Being elected to Congress is regarded as being sent on a looting raid for one’s friends. – George F. Will, Newsweek

521. Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies. – Groucho Marx

522. Men rise from one ambition to another – first they seek to secure themselves from attack, and then they attack others. – Machiavelli

523. This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as we do when the baby gets hold of a hammer. – Will Rogers

524. Wherever politics intrudes upon economic life, political success is readily attained by saying what people like to hear rather than what is demonstrably true. Instead of safeguarding truth and honesty, the state then tends to become a major source of insincerity and mendacity. – Hans F. Sennholz

525. Those who make peaceful change impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. – John F. Kennedy

527. Politicians are always interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs. – P.J. O’Rourke

528. A concern for states rights, local self government and regional identity used to be taken for granted everywhere in America. But the United States is no longer, as it once was, a federal union of diverse states and regions. National uniformity is being imposed by the political class that runs Washington, the economic class that owns Wall Street and the cultural class in charge of Hollywood and the Ivy League. – Michael Hill, professor of British History, University of Alabama

529. Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory. – John Kenneth Galbraith

530. Since a politician never believes what he says, he is surprised when others believe him. – Charles DeGaulle

531. Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. – Ronald Reagan

532. Men who have greatness within them don’t go in for politics. – Albert Camus

533. It may be true … that “you can’t fool all the people all the time”, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country. – Will & Ariel Durant

534. Suppose you were an idiot and suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself. – Mark Twain

535. Politicians can’t give us anything without depriving us of something else. Government is not a god. Every dime they spend must first be taken from someone else. – Gary Asmus

536. Laws are like sausages. You sleep far better the less you know about how they are made. – Otto Von Bismark

537. Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. – Helen Keller

538. Democracies have been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and in general have been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their death. – James Madison

540. If I deny the authority of the State when it presents my tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end. This is hard, this makes it impossible for a man to live honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward respects. – Henry David Thoreau

541. Voters who live off taxpayers are the Democrats’ ace in the hole. The Democrats created big programs and never let the recipients forget it. This gives them an initial advantage of tens of millions of votes in any presidential election. – Joseph Sobran

542. The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not. – Thomas Jefferson

543. Multiple political parties are a fact of life throughout Europe and most of the West. Today the only countries without strong multiparty political systems are the United States and a number of third world military dictatorships. – Thomas H. Naylor

544. Vote for the man who promises least; he’ll be the least disappointing. – Bernard Baruch

545. It is indeed a singular thing that people wish to pass laws to nullify the disagreeable consequences that the law of responsibility entails. Will they never realize that they do not eliminate these consequences but merely pass them along to other people? The result is one injustice the more and one moral the less. – Frederic Bastiat

546. Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it. – Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

547. The voice of the majority is no proof of justice. – Johann von Schiller

548. It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood, if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be like tomorrow. – James Madison, Federalist Paper #62

549. A great many laws in a country, like many physicians, is a sign of malady. – Voltaire

550. An individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law. – Martin Luther King Jr.

551. Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money. – Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651

552. The rule of law can be wiped out in one misguided, however well-intentioned, generation. – William T. Gossett, President ABA

553. Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. – Benjamin Franklin

554. The government’s only proper job is to protect individual rights against violence by force or fraud … to protect men from foreign invaders … to settle disputes among men according to objective laws … The greatness of the Founding Fathers was how well they understood this issue and how close some of them came to understanding it perfectly. – Ayn Rand

555. The Constitution is not hearsay. It is not a bunch of legal myths passed along by word of mouth. It is not a depository for judicial delusions and ideological pipe dreams. It is not a figment of some justice’s Marxian imagination. It is a written document – a legally binding contract whose words, spirit and intent are clear. – Linda Bowles, nationally syndicated columnist

556. The ultimate touchstone of constitutionality is the Constitution itself and not what we have said about it. – Felix Frankfurter, Graves vs. New York; 1939

557. We the people are the rightful master of both congress and the courts – not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution. – Abraham Lincoln

558. Terrorism is a direct response to the crimes our government has committed against foreigners (besides which, the actual terrorists are within our own government) – Gore Vidal

559. If [drugs] didn’t exist, our government would have to invent them, the better to enact laws aimed at keeping the citizens “sinless and obedient.” – Gore Vidal

560. Going to war accelerated the move from indirect to direct rule. Almost any state that makes war finds that it cannot pay for the effort from its accumulated reserves and current revenues. Almost all war-making states borrow extensively, raise taxes, and seize the means of combat – including men – from reluctant citizens who have other uses for their resources. – Charles Tilly

561. When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty, and there is nothing to fear from them, then he is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. – Plato, 347 B.C.

562. Governments need armies to protect them from their enslaved and oppressed subjects. – Tolstoy

563. I say one evil empire down … one to go. – Michael Moore, The Big One

564. The laws of economics tell us that the expansion of the central state can’t go on forever. Its limit is reached when the looted turn on the looters. And that’s beginning to happen. More than six decades of hard work for American liberty beginning with the Old Right opposition to the Roosevelt Revolution and continuing with the Mises Institute, is beginning to bear fruit. – Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. 11-27-96

565. The leviathan state, that monster devouring civilization in this century, is in the throes of death. This is not a wish or a prediction, but a conclusion drawn from a broad look at the trends of the last decade and a half, which, if we take the right steps, can continue on into the next century. What has happened around the world – nations states collapsing, markets outwitting planners, citizens rising up against government masters – can and is happening here at home. – Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

566. In order to become the master, the politician poses as the servant. – Charles de Gaulle

567. No state, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union. Plainly, the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy. [!] – Abraham Lincoln

568. We protest solemnly in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor. In independence we seek no conquest, no aggrandizement, no concession of any kind from the states with which we have lately been confederated. All we ask is to be let alone – that those who never held power over us shall not now attempt our subjugation by arms. This we will, we must resist to the direst extremity. The moment that this pretension is abandoned, the sword will drop from our grasp, and we shall be ready to enter into treaties of amnesty and commerce that cannot but be mutually beneficial. So long as this pretension is maintained, with a firm reliance on that Divine Power which covers with its protection the just cause, we must continue to struggle for our inherent right to freedom, independence, and self government. – President Jefferson Davis’ first address to the Confederate Congress

569. In our government-controlled schools we are taught that Lincoln was our greatest president because his war ended slavery and saved the Union. As usual, the other side of the story – the side that reflects poorly on the government – somehow gets lost. – Richard J. Maybury, The Abe Lincoln Hoax

570. So the case stands, and under all the passion of the parties and the cries of battle lie the two chief moving causes of the struggle. Union means so many millions a year lost to the South; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many many other evils … the quarrel between North and South is, as it stands, solely a fiscal quarrel. – Charles Dickens, as editor of All the Year Round, a British periodical in 1862

571. Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right – a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. – Abraham Lincoln [!], January 12, 1848 speech in Congress

572. Federalism is not when the central government graciously allows the states to do this or that. That is just another form of administration. True federalism is when the people of the states set limits to the central government. Fundamentally, federalism means states rights. The cause of states rights is the cause of liberty. They rise or fall together. – Clyde C. Wilson

573. For 134 years the American people have been led to believe that the right of secession had been overturned by a “verdict of arms,” but that isn’t true … It is true the shot fired at Fort Sumter was a mistake since it provided the pretext for the Southland to be invaded by foreign troops, but the right of secession realized through the ballot box remains an essential part of our constitutional order. – George Kalas, Chairman Emeritus, The Southern Party

574. The American people, North and South, went into the [Civil] war as citizens of their respective states, they came out as subjects … what they thus lost they have never got back. – H.L. Mencken

575. The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better. – Thomas Jefferson

576. I expect to see trade wars, foreign policy disasters, a few race riots, a decrease in personal liberty, higher taxes, higher inflation and probably, economic collapse. The silver lining is, secession will probably become more feasible. – Charley Reese, What the next four years has in store for us column Nov. 8.1996 in Orlando Sentinal

577. Up until the late unpleasantness of the Civil war, then, the right of secession was more or less taken for granted in many quarters, and there has never been any amendment or even a Supreme Court decision saying it’s improper. – Samual Francis, Secession May Be Legal But Not Expedient, Conservative Chronicles

578. If there be any among us who wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed, as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. – Thomas Jefferson’s First Inaugural Address

579. The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so … – Alex de Tocqueville, Democracy In America

580. If [the Declaration of Independence] justifies the secession from the British empire of 3,000,000 of colonists in 1776, we do not see why it would not justify the secession of 5,000,000 of Southrons from the Federal Union in 1861. – New York Tribune, December 17, 1860

581. The United States has become too big, too authoritarian, and too undemocratic. Its states assume too little responsibility for the solution of their own social, economic, and political problems. So starved for revenue are our states that they are all too willing to abdicate to the federal government their responsibilities for public education, criminal justice, employment, and environmental protection. Fine tuning or patch our badly crippled political system will do little to turn the situation around. There is only one solution to the problems of America – peaceful dissolution, not piecemeal devolution. – Thomas H. Naylor & William H. Willimon, Downsizing the U.S.A.

582. The error is in the assumption that the General Government is a party to the constitutional compact. The States … formed the compact, acting as sovereign and independent communities. – John C. Calhoun

583. The procedure of secession was to have an election for delegates to a state convention, to meet in convention, and to adopt ordinances of secession. This was done in accord with the Southern understanding of what would be in keeping with the United States Constitution. It had, after all, been ratified by the states acting through conventions. Could they not “un-ratify”it – secede from the Union – in the same fashion? – Clarence Carson, A Basic History Of The United States

584. Our government is an agency of delegated and strictly limited powers. Its founders did not look to its preservation by force; but the chain they wove to bind these States together was one of love and mutual good offices … – Jefferson Davis

585. If you would not confront your neighbor and demand his money at the point of a gun to solve every new problem that may appear in your life, you should not allow the government to do it for you. – William E. Simon

586. A democracy is a place where numerous elections are held, at great cost, without issues, and with interchangeable candidates. – Gore Vidal

590. The difference between death and taxes is, death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets. – Will Rogers

591. The Constitution is a limitation on the government, not on private individuals. It does not prescribe the conduct of private individuals, only the conduct of the government. It is not a charter for government power, but a charter of the citizens’ protection against the government. – Ayn Rand

592. Government should stay the hell out of people’s business. – Senator Barry Goldwater

594. “A well-crafted pepperoni pizza, being necessary to the preservation of a diverse menu, the right of the people to keep and cook tomatoes, shall not be infringed.”I would ask you to try to argue that this statement says that only pepperoni pizzas can keep and cook tomatoes, and only well-crafted ones at that. This is basically what the so-called states rights people argue with respect to the well-regulated militia, vs. the right to keep and bear arms. – Bruce Tiemann

595. The New Deal Court essentially told Congress: It doesn’t matter what the Constitution says or what limits on government it establishes, you are empowered to spend money on whatever you please. And so Congress does, even though its profligacy has placed the nation in great economic peril. – Stephen Moore, Director of Fiscal Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, March, 1997

596. “I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic….” – Congressional Oath of Office

597. The word politics is derived from the words “poly” meaning many and “ticks” meaning blood sucking parasites. – Anonymous

598. I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. – Thomas Jefferson, to Archibald Stuart, 1791. ME 8:276

599. We have rights, as individuals, to give as much of our own money as we please to charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of public money. – David Crockett, Congressman 1827-35

600. I never consider a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend. –Thomas Jefferson

601. Experience [has] shown that, even under the best forms [of government], those entrusted with power have, in time and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny. – Thomas Jefferson 1779

602. We Americans have no commission from God to police the world – Benjamin Harrison

603. The Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself. –Benjamin Franklin

604. Switzerland is a land where crime is virtually unknown, yet most Swiss males are required by law to keep in their homes what amounts to a portable, personal machine gun. –Tom Clancy

605. To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them. – George Mason

606. You can’t get rid of poverty by giving people money. – P.J. O’Rourke

607. Government is not the solution, but rather the cause of our problems. – Ronald Reagan

608. If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in 5 years there’d be a shortage of sand. – Milton Friedman

610. When words lose their meaning, people lose their liberty. – Confucius

611. An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. – George Eliot

612. Politics is the art of obtaining money from the rich and votes from the poor on the pretext of protecting each from the other. – Anonymous

613. There is only one way to kill capitalism – by taxes, taxes, and more taxes. – Karl Marx

614. If there is no wind, row. – Chinese Proverb

615. [We] should not blame a gun itself for any crime or any acts of violence, any more than we can blame a pen for misspelling a word. – Senator Wallace F. Bennett (R-UT), Congressional Record, 5/16/68

616. Politicians never accuse you of “greed” for wanting other people’s money – only for wanting to keep your own money. – Joseph Sobran

617. When politicians say “I’m in politics,” it may or may not be possible to trust them, but when they say, “I’m in public service,” you know you should flee. – Albert Jay Nock

618. Man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts. – Ronald Reagan, farewell address, 1/11/89

619. All socialism involves slavery. – Herbert Spencer

620. Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. – Will Rogers

621. Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm. – Malayan proverb

622. Mankind will in time discover that unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel as unlimited despots. –John Adams 1793

623. Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark. –Walter Lippmann 1937

624. Education is a weapon, whose effect depends on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed. –Joseph Stalin

626. Whatever the issue, let freedom offer us a hundred choices, instead of having government force one answer on everyone. – Harry Browne

627. I want a government small enough to fit inside the Constitution. – Harry Browne

628. Immigrants used to come to America seeking freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from government. Now they come looking for free health care, free education, and a free lunch. – Harry Browne

631. Government seems to operate on the principle that if even one individual is incapable of using his freedom competently, no one can be allowed to be free. – Harry Browne

632. The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants, and it provides the further advantage of giving the servants of tyranny a good conscience. – Albert Camus

633. A society that puts equality … ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. – Milton Friedman

634. Government is about coercion. Limiting government is the single most important instrument for guaranteeing liberty. We’re working on a third generation which has little in the way of education about what our Constitution means and why it was written. Thus, we’ve fallen easy prey to charlatens, quacks, and hustlers. – Dr. Walter Williams

635. Few men desire liberty; most men wish only for a just master. – Sallust

636. It is hard to imagine a more stupid or more dangerous way of making decisions than by putting those decisions in the hands of people who pay no price for being wrong. – Thomas Sowell

638. A society based on the freedom to choose is better than a society based on the principles of socialism, communism and coercion. – Milton Friedman

639. Political leaders in capitalist countries who cheer the collapse of socialism in other countries continue to favor socialist solutions in their own. They know the words, but they have not learned the tune. – Milton Friedman

649. The Declaration, after all, catalogued the assaults on our freedoms committed by Britain’s King George III. What has been built up over the last two and a quarter centuries is a structure that dwarfs George III’s regime. – K.E. Grubbs, Jr., Investor’s Business Daily, 7/3/01

651. There’s no greater service to this country than the defense of its freedom. – Senator Barry Goldwater, 1964 (1909-1998)

652. A people incapable of protecting themselves will lose their rights as a free people, becoming either servile dependents of the state or of the criminal predators who are their de facto masters. – Robert Cottrol, George Washington University law professor

653. The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best. – Thomas Sowell

654. The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden. – Dennis Hastert, House Speaker

655. It is the fundamental theory of all the more recent American law … that the average citizen is half-witted, and hence not to be trusted to either his own devices or his own thoughts. – H. L. Mencken

656. Most people want security in this world, not liberty. – H.L. Mencken (1880-1956)

657. For the average American, freedom of speech is simply the freedom to repeat what everyone else is saying and no more. – Gore Vidal

Contrary to popular opinion, the Constitution was not – and is not – a grant of rights to the citizenry. Instead, the Constitution is a “barbed-wire entanglement” designed to interfere with, restrict, and impede government officials in the exercise of political power.

665. Americans have the mistaken viewpoint that Lady Liberty is only a peacetime luxury who is ill-equipped to fight the nasties. Therefore, they reason, we need an equally nasty Big Brother. Americans have forgotten that Lady Liberty is one ferocious mother when protecting her children. – Mary Ruwart

666. Try to halt violence by restricting gun ownership and you won’t halt violence. But you will create entire classes of new criminals – people who make paperwork errors, violate technical specification of the law, or rebel against the new restrictions. And you’ll create new bureaus, new enforcement arms, new prisons to punish them. You’ll make hordes of lawyers and bureaucrats very happy. Organized criminals will be grateful to the naive moral crusaders (“useful idiots”) as they profit by selling an illegal product. And ordinary street criminals will bless fools, legislators, and “leaders” for making their job so much safer. – JPFO’s “Bill of RIghts Sentinel”, Fall 2001.

667. What is the basic, the essential, the crucial principle that differentiates freedom from slavery? It is the principle of voluntary action versus physical coercion or compulsion. – Ayn Rand

668. For libertarians, freedom entails the right of people to live their lives any way they choose, so long as their conduct is peaceful. For conservatives, freedom entails the right of government to do just about anything it wants, even if its conduct is violent. – Jacob Hornberger

669. A caged canary is safe but not free. – Walter Williams

670. The prospect of a government that treats all its citizens as criminal suspects is more terrifying than any terrorist. And even more frightening is a citizenry that can accept the surrender of its freedoms as the price of “freedom”. – Joe Sobran

671. There is nothing so bad that politics cannot make it worse. – Thomas Sowell

672. Politicians, like diapers, have to be changed frequently – and for the very same reason. – Anonymous

673. The reason welfare is bad is not because it costs too much, nor because it “undermines the work ethic,” but because it is intrinsically at odds with the way human beings come to live satisfying lives. – Charles Murray

674. Public Schools too often fail because they are shielded from the very force that improves performance and sparks innovation in nearly every other human enterprise – competition. – Robert Lutz/Clark Durant

675. He who regulates everything by laws, is more likely to arouse vices than reform them. – Spinoza

676. The welfare state is the oldest con game in the world. First you take people’s money away quietly, and then you give some of it back to them flamboyantly. – Thomas Sowell

677. If politicians were serious about day care for children, instead of just sloganizing about it, nothing they could do would improve the quality of child care more than by lifting the heavy burden of taxation that forces so many families to have both parents working. – Thomas Sowell

678. The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition is so powerful that it is alone, and without any assistance, capable not only of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting 100 impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations. – Adam Smith

679. Education – compulsory schooling, compulsory learning – is a tyranny and a crime against the human mind and spirit. Let all those escape it who can, any way they can. – John Holt

680. The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline. – Milton Friedman

682. The ground of liberty is to be gained by inches, and we must be contented to secure what we can get from time to time and eternally press forward for what is yet to get. It takes time to persuade men to do even what is for their own good. – Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826 3rd US President & Founding Father)

683. “Democracy – A government of the masses. Authority derived through mass meeting or any form of direct expression. Results in mobocracy. Attitude toward property is communistic – negating property rights. Attitude toward law is that the will of the majority shall regulate, whether it is based upon deliberation or governed by passion, prejudice, and impulse, without restraint or regard for consequences. Results in demagogism, license, agitation, discontent, anarchy.” – 1928 U.S. Army Training Manual

684. … so long as the people do not care to exercise their freedom, those who wish to tyrannize will do so; for tyrants are active and ardent, and will devote themselves in the name of any number of gods, religious and otherwise, to put shackles upon sleeping men. – Voltairine de Cleyre

685. Arms are the only true badge of liberty. The possession of arms is the distinction of a free man from a slave. – Andrew Fletcher 1698

686. Economic freedom is an essential requisite for political freedom. By enabling people to cooperate with one another without coercion or central direction, it reduces the area over which political power is exercised. – Milton Friedman

687. Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions. – Milton Friedman

688. The elementary truth is that the Great Depression was produced by government mismanagement [of money]. It was not produced by the failure of private enterprise. – Milton Friedman

689. The essential notion of a capitalist society … is voluntary cooperation, voluntary exchange. The essential notion of a socialist society is force. – Milton Friedman

690. Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds. – Milton Friedman

691. The American people are becoming more and more afraid of, and are running away from, their own revolution. – Leonard E. Read

692. The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it. – John Stuart Mill

693. I shall exert every faculty I possess in aiding to prevent the Constitution from being nullified, destroyed, or impaired; and even though I should see it fail, I will still, with a voice feeble, perhaps, but earnest as ever issued from human lips, and with extinguish, call on the people to come to its rescue. – Daniel Webster

694. The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil constitution, are worth defending at all hazards; and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks … It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men. – Samuel Adams

695. The fact throughout history is that whenever government dominates the economic affairs of its citizenry, a free society is eroded, then destroyed, and a minority government ensues. Personal liberty without economic liberty is an absolute contradiction; the one cannot exist without the other. – William E. Simon

696. Freedom is not a luxury for a few wealthy nations; as many of our liberal pundits try to tell us, but a necessity for the poor and hungry. – Edward P. Coleson

697. Were it necessary to bring a majority into a comprehension of the libertarian philosophy, the cause of liberty would be utterly hopeless. Every significant movement in history has been led by one or just a few individuals with a small minority of energetic supporters. – Leonard E. Read

698. Man must have the right of choice, even to choose wrong, if he shall ever learn to choose right. – Josiah C. Wedgwood

699. Central planning will eventually destroy individual liberty by concentrating all political power in one person or in a committee; furthermore, it will eventually end our prosperity by laying the dead hand of state control on the economy. – Robert M. Thornton

700. The greatest threat to the future of our nation – to our freedom – is not foreign military aggression … but the growing dependence of the people on a paternalistic government. A nation is no stronger than its people and the best measure of their strength is how they accept responsibility. There will never be a great society unless the materialism of the welfare state is replaced by individual initiative and responsibility. – Charles B. Shuman

701. The king has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent Swarms of Officers to harass our People and eat out their substance. – U.S. Declaration of Independence

702. Few of us seem to want to keep government out of our personal affairs and responsibilities. Many of us seem to favor various types of government guaranteed and compulsory “security.” We say that we want personal freedom, but we demand government housing, government price controls, government-guaranteed jobs and wages. We boast that we are responsible persons, but we vote for candidates who promise us special privileges, government pensions, government subsidies, and government electricity. – Dean Russell

703. The beneficial effect of state intervention, especially in the form of legislation, is direct, immediate, and so to speak, visible, while its evil effects are gradual and indirect and lay out of sight … Hence the majority of mankind must almost of necessity look with undue favor upon governmental intervention. – A. V. Dicey

704. The right most valued by all civilized men is the right to be left alone. – Justice Louis Brandeis

705. It must be obvious that liberty necessarily means freedom to choose foolishly as well as wisely; freedom to choose evil as well as good; freedom to enjoy the rewards of good judgment, and freedom to suffer the penalties of bad judgment. If this is not true, the word “freedom” has no meaning. – Ben Moreell

706. There is nothing new in state interventionism. It is as old and reactionary as societal organization itself. Always, when it permeates the body politic, it kills the nation. – Spruille Braden

707. Throughout forty centuries of human experience, price controls at their best have always been a miserable failure. At their worst, they have led to famine and bloodshed – to defeat and to disaster. – Irving S. Olds

708. Somehow, the fact that more poor people are on welfare, receiving more generous payments, does not seem to have made this country a nice place to live – not even for the poor on welfare, whose condition seems not noticeably better than when they were poor and off welfare. Something appears to have gone wrong; a liberal and compassionate social policy has bred all sorts of unanticipated and perverse consequences. – Irving Kristol

709. Given man’s nature, freedom will always be in jeopardy, and the only question that need concern each of us is if and how well we took our stand in its defense during the short period of time when we were potentially a part of the struggle. – Benjamin Rogge

710. It seems that wherever the Welfare State is involved, the moral precept, “Thou shalt not steal,” becomes altered to say: “Thou shalt not steal, except for what thou deemest to be a worthy cause, where thou thinkest that thou canst use the loot for a better purpose than wouldst the victim of the theft.” – F. A. Harper

711. We must remember that the principal instrument of government is coercion and that our government officials are no more moral, omnipotent, nor omniscient than are any of the rest of us. Once we understand the basic principles which must be observed if freedom is to be safeguarded against government, we may become more hesitant in turning our personal problems and responsibilities over to that agency of coercion, with its insatiable appetite for power. – W. C. Mullendore

712. Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few … No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare. – James Madison

713. Property is the fruit of labor. Property is desirable, is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently to build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence. – Abraham Lincoln

714. The essential quality of a free economy is that it cannot be planned. It leaves the solution of problems to the inspiration of the individuals in the untrammeled population. When something approaching a free economy has existed, it has always worked better than the schemes of any planners. – Thomas H. Barber

715. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. – Frédéric Bastiat

716. The proliferation of bureaucrats and its invariable accompaniment, much heavier tax levies on the productive part of the population, are the recognizable signs, not of a great, but of a decaying society. Historians know that both phenomena were especially marked in the declining eras of the Roman Empire in the West and of its successor state, the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. – William Henry Chamberlin

718. Do not consider Collectivists as “sincere but deluded idealists”. The proposal to enslave some men for the sake of others is not an ideal; brutality is not “idealistic,” no matter what its purpose. Do not ever say that the desire to “do good” by force is a good motive. Neither power-lust nor stupidity are good motives. – Ayn Rand

719. Government ought to be as much open to improvement as anything which appertains to man, instead of which it has been monopolized from age to age, by the most ignorant and vicious of the human race. Need we any other proof of their wretched management, than the excess of debts and taxes with which every nation groans, and the quarrels into which they have precipitated the world?” – Thomas Paine

720. Painful as it may be to hear it, there’s nothing special about the people of this country that sets them apart from the other people of the world. It is the Bill of Rights, and only the Bill of Rights, that keeps us from becoming the world’s biggest banana republic. The moment we forget that, the American Dream is over. – Alexander Hope, “Looking Forward”

721. Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind-in-the-mass through some pet formula of their own. – Henry Grady Weaver, author of a classic book on freedom, The Mainspring of Human Progress

723. I do not challenge the dedication and sincerity of those who disagree with the freedom philosophy and confidently promote government solutions for all our ills. I am just absolutely convinced that the best formula for giving us peace and preserving the American way of life is freedom, limited government, and minding our own business overseas. – Ron Paul

724. If an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another. – Milton Friedman

725. If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more. – Erica Jong

726. The harm done by ordinary criminals, murderers, gangsters, and thieves is negligible in comparison with the agony inflicted upon human beings by the professional do-gooders, who attempt to set themselves up as gods on earth and who would ruthlessly force their views on all others – with the abiding assurance that the end justifies the means. – Henry Grady Weaver, author of a classic book on freedom, The Mainspring of Human Progress

727. Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first. – Mark Twain

728. There is no limit to the ingenuity of man if it is properly and vigorously applied under conditions of peace and justice. – Winston Churchill

729. Self-sacrifice enables us to sacrifice other people without blushing. – George Bernard Shaw

731. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves. – John Henry Boetker

732. There is only one success – To be able to spend your life in your own way. – Christopher Morley

733. If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies. – Milton Friedman – Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

734. They told me if I voted for Goldwater, he would get us into a war in Vietnam. Well, I voted for Goldwater and that’s what happened. – William F. Buckley, Jr. (founder of National Review)

736. “Let me tell you how it will be. There’s one for you, nineteen for me. ‘Cause I’m the taxman.” – George Harrison, (From song “Taxman” on The Beatles album Revolver 1966)

737. The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects – his laziness, incompetence, improvidence, or stupidity. – Henry Hazlitt

738. Libertarians believe the answer to America’s political problems is the same commitment to freedom that earned America its greatness: a free-market economy and the abundance and prosperity it brings; a dedication to civil liberties and personal freedom that marks this country above all others; and a foreign policy of non-intervention, peace, and free trade as prescribed by America’s founders. – The Libertarian Party: A Short History, 2000

739. We’re told cars are wasteful. Wasteful of what? Oil did a lot of good sitting in the ground for millions of years. We’re told cars should be replaced with mass transportation. But it’s hard to reach the drive through window at McDonald’s from a speeding train. And we’re told cars cause pollution. A hundred years ago city streets were ankle deep in horse excrement. What kind of pollution do you want? Would you rather die of cancer at eighty or typhoid fever at nine? – P.J. O’Rourke

740. When politics are used to allocate resources, the resources all end up being allocated to politics.” – P.J. O’Rourke

741. This country was founded by religious nuts with guns. – P.J. O’Rourke

742. When one gets in bed with government, one must expect the diseases it spreads. – Ron Paul, M.D., Republican congressman from Texas and Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1988

743. Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly “reforming” their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they’re always busy “reforming” is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times. – Lawrence W. Reed, economist, in The Freeman

744. Those (who) seek to establish systems of Government based on the regimentation of all Human Beings by a handful of individual rulers…call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt, President of The United States

745. Liberals love to say things like, “We’re just asking everyone to pay their fair share.” But government is not about asking. It is about telling. The difference is fundamental. It is the difference between making love and being raped, between working for a living and being a slave. The Internal Revenue service is not asking anybody to do anything. It confiscates your assets and puts you behind bars if you don’t pay. – Thomas Sowell, Forbes, July 1994

746. Man, no doubt, owes many other moral duties to his fellow men; such as to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, care for the sick, protect the defenseless, assist the weak, and enlighten the ignorant. But these are simply moral duties, of which each man must be his own judge, in each particular case, as to whether, and how, and how far, he can, or will perform them. – Lysander Spooner

747. The worst evils which mankind has ever had to endure were inflicted by bad governments. The state can be and has often been in the course of history the main source of mischief and disaster. – Ludwig von Mises

748. Economic history is a long record of government policies that failed because they were designed with a bold disregard for the laws of economics. – Ludwig von Mises

749. Who the hell is FICA and who said he could have any of my paycheck! – From the movie Ferris Buehler’s Day Off

750. Dependence leads to subservience. – Thomas Jefferson

751. Libertarians have quietly become America’s best organized and most significant third party. Unlike flash-in-the-pan parties organized around cults of personality like Ross Perot’s and Ralph Nader’s, Libertarians have organized at the grass roots for the long haul. They are fast approaching the point where they may force the major parties to reckon with Libertarian ideas. – Bob Ewegen, The Denver Post, 11/24/01

753. When angry, count ten before you speak; if very angry, a hundred. – Thomas Jefferson

754. I can think of few plainer, more direct abridgments of the freedoms of the First Amendment than to compel persons to support candidates, parties, ideologies or causes that they are against. – Justice Black Lathrop v. Donohue, 367 U.S. 820, 873 (1961) (Black, J. dissenting).

755. The worst crime against working people is a company which fails to operate at a profit. – Samuel Gompers

756. Concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth. – Rudolph Rummel

757. When liberty is taken away by force it can be restored by force. When it is relinquished voluntarily by default it can never be recovered. – Dorothy Thompson, newspaper columnist

758. What pays under capitalism is satisfying the common man, the customer. The more people you satisfy, the better for you. – Ludwig von Mises

759. According to the Tax Foundation, taxes now consume more than 38% of the average family’s budget. That is more than is spent on food, clothing, housing, and transportation combined. Compare this to the plight of medieval serfs. They only had to give the lord of the manor one-third of their output — and they were considered slaves. So what does that make us? – Daniel Mitchell, The Washington Times, 3/9/99

760. The same government that brought you urban renewal is likely to make an even worse mess of suburban renewal. – Steven Hayward, The National Review, 3/22/99

765. The cry has been that when war is declared, all opposition should therefore be hushed. A sentiment more unworthy of a free country could hardly be propagated. If the doctrine be admitted, rulers have only to declare war and they are screened at once from scrutiny. – William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), Life, 1848

766. A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you. – Ramsey Clark, U.S. Attorney General, New York Times, 10/02/77

767. The Bill of Rights is a born rebel. It reeks with sedition. In every clause it shakes its fist in the face of constituted authority … It is the one guarantee of human freedom to the American people. – Frank I. Cobb (1869-1923), LaFollette’s Magazine, 01/20

768. Men in authority will always think that criticism of their policies is dangerous. They will always equate their policies with patriotism, and find criticism subversive. – Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998), Freedom and Order, 1966

769. Freedom is not a luxury that we can indulge in when at last we have security and prosperity and enlightenment; it is, rather, antecedent to all of these, for without it we can have neither security nor prosperity nor enlightenment. – Henry Steele Commager (1902-1998), Freedom, Loyalty and Dissent, 1954

770. It will be found an unjust and unwise jealousy to deprive a man of his natural liberty upon a supposition that he may abuse it. – Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Address, First Protectorate Parliament, 1654

771. Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like. – Alan Dershowitz, in The Conceptual Foundations of Anglo-American Jurisprudence in Religion and Reason, 82 Mich L. Rev., 204 (Dan Gifford), 1995

772. The privacy and dignity of our citizens [are] being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a [person’s] life. – William O. Douglas (1898-1980), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Osborne v. United States

773. It is better, so the Fourth Amendment teaches us, that the guilty sometimes go free than the citizens be subject to easy arrest. – William O. Douglas (1898-1980), Henry v. United States, 1959

774. Of all the tyrannies on human kind the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

John Dryden (1631-1700), The Hind and the Panther, 1687

775. Abuse of power isn’t limited to bad guys in other nations. It happens in our own country if we’re not vigilant. – Clint Eastwood, Parade Magazine, 1/12/97

776. Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them. – Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), U.S. President, Reader’s Digest, 12/63

777. Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. – Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969), U.S. President, Speech, Columbia University, 1954

778. Man exists for his own sake and not to add a laborer to the State. – Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Journal, 1839

779. He is free who lives as he wishes to live; who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance, nor to force; whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid. – Epictetus (ca 55-135 A.D.), Discourses, ca 100 A.D.

780. Complete and accurate surveillance as a means of control is probably a practical impossibility. What is much more likely is a loss of privacy and constant inconvenience as the wrong people gain access to information, as one wastes time convincing the inquisitors that one is in fact innocent, or as one struggles to untangle the errors of the errant machine. – Victor Ferkiss, Technological Man: The Myth and the Reality, 1969

781. We are willing enough to praise freedom when it is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship. – E. M. Forster (1879-1970), Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

782. “For your own good” is a persuasive argument that will eventually make a man agree to his own destruction. – Janet Frame, Faces In The Water, 1982

783. Being tolerant does not mean that I share another one’s belief. But it does mean that I acknowledge another one’s right to believe, and obey, his own conscience. – Victor Frankl (1905-1997), The Will To Meaning

784. The more laws the more offenders. – Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), Gnomologia, 1732

785. The individual is the true reality of life. A cosmos in himself, he does not exist for the State, nor for that abstraction called “society” or the “nation,” which is only a collection of individuals. – Emma Goldman (1869-1940), The Place of the Individual in Society

786. There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another … All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. – Emma Goldman (1869-1940), My Disillusionment in Russia, 1923

787. The freedom of speech and the freedom of the press have not been granted to the people in order that they may say things which please, and which are based upon accepted thought, but the right to say the things which displease, the right to say the things which convey the new and yet unexpected thoughts, the right to say things, even though they do a wrong. – Samuel Gompers (1850-1924), Seventy Years of Life and Labor, 1925

788. I know of no method to secure the repeal of bad or obnoxious laws so effective as their stringent execution. – Ulysses S. Grant (1882-1885), U.S. President, Inaugural Address, 4 March 1869

789. Heresy is only another word for freedom of thought. – Graham Greene (1904-1991)

790. The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism, and ought to have no place among Republicans and Christians. – Angelica Grimke (1805-1879), Anti-Slavery Examiner, September 1836

791. Books won’t stay banned. They won’t burn. Ideas won’t go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. – A. Whitney Griswold (1909-1963), New York Times, 24 February 1959

793. To limit the press is to insult a nation; to prohibit reading of certain books is to declare the inhabitants to be either fools or knaves. – Claude-Adrien Helvetius

794. What seems fair enough against a squalid huckster of bad liquor may take on a different face, if used by a government determined to suppress political opposition under the guise of sedition. – Learned Hand (1872-1961), Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals, United States v. Kirschenblatt, 1926

795. I cannot assent to the view, if it be meant that the legislature may impair or abridge the rights of a free press and of free speech whenever it thinks that the public welfare requires that it be done. The public welfare cannot override constitutional privilege. – John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Patterson v. Chicago

796. In view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our Constitution is colorblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. – John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896

797. The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop. – Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-1870), From the Other Shore, 1849

798. A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to. – Granville Hicks (1901-1982)

799. Where men cannot freely convey their thoughts to one another, no other liberty is secure. – William E. Hocking (1873-1966), Freedom of the Press, 1947

800. There can be no freedom without freedom to fail. – Eric Hoffer (1902-1983), The Ordeal of Change, 1964

801. If there is any principle of the constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other it is the principle of free thought – not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate. – Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, United States v. Schwimmer, 1929

802. Liberty is often a heavy burden on a man. It involves the necessity for perpetual choice which is the kind of labor men have always dreaded. – Oliver Wendall Holmes, Sr. (1809-1884), Elsie Venner, 1861

803. Truth, in its struggles for recognition, passes through four distinct stages. First, we say it is damnable, dangerous, disorderly, and will surely disrupt society. Second, we declare it is heretical, infidelic and contrary to the Bible. Third, we say it is really a matter of no importance either one way or the other. Fourth, we aver that we have always upheld it and believed it. – Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), Roycroft Dictionary and Book of Epigrams, 1923

804. Emergency does not increase granted power or remove or diminish the restrictions imposed upon power granted or reserved. The Constitution was adopted in a period of grave emergency. Its grants of power to the federal government and its limitations of the power of the States were determined in the light of emergency, and they are not altered by emergency. – Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), Chief Justice, U.S. Supreme Court, Home Building & Loan Assn v. Blairsdell, 1934

805. The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest. – Charles Evans Hughes (1862-1948), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Lovell v. City of Griffin, 1938

806. I believe the State exists for the development of individual lives, not individuals for the development of the state. – Julian Huxley (1878-1975)

808. It is not the function of our Government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. – Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, American Communications Assn v. Douds, 1950

809. The very purpose of a Bill of Rights was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy. One’s right to life, liberty and property, to free speech, a free press, freedom of worship and assembly may not be submitted to vote; they depend on no elections. – Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, West Virginia Board of Education vs. Barnette, 1943

810. It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. – Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846), U.S. President, Notes on the State of Virginia, 1782

811. The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it to be always kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere. – Thomas Jefferson (1743-1846), U.S. President, Letter to Abigail Adams, 22 February 1787

812. We are reluctant to admit that we owe our liberties to men of a type that today we hate and fear – unruly men, disturbers of the peace, men who resent and denounce what Whitman called “the insolence of elected persons” – in word, free men … – Gerald W. Johnson (1890-1980), American Freedom and the Press, 1958

813. Every man should know that his conversations, his correspondence, and his personal life are private. – Lyndon B. Johnson (1908-1973), Remarks, 3/10/67

814. A shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. – Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933

815. The wave of the future is not the conquest of the world by a single dogmatic creed but the liberation of the diverse energies of free nations and free men. – John F. Kennedy (1917-1963), U.S. President, Speech, University of California, 3/23/63

816. At the heart of western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man … is the touchstone of value, and all society, groups, the state, exist for his benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and abiding practice of any western society. – Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968), U.S. Senator, Speech, University of Capetown, 6/6/66

817. Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grand-children are once more slaves. – D. H. Lawrence (1885-1938), 1915

818. If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. – Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865), First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1861

819. In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs. – Walter Lippmann (1889-1974), An Inquiry into the Principles of the Good Society, 1937

820. To argue against any breach of liberty from the ill use that may be made of it, is to argue against liberty itself, since all is capable of being abused. – Lord George Lyttleton (1709-1773)

821. What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose; the right to create for yourself the alternative of choice. Without the responsibility and exercise of choice a man is not a man but a member, an instrument, a thing. – Archibald Macleish (1882-1982), 12/04/37

822. If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a state has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. – Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, 1969

823. To change masters is not to be free. – Jose Marti y Perez (1853-1895)

824. Tolerance is a better guarantee of freedom than brotherly love; for a man may love his brother so much that he feels himself thereby appointed his brother’s keeper. – Everett Dean Martin (1880-1941), Liberty, 1930

825. No man is great enough or wise enough for any of us to surrender our destiny to. The only way in which anyone can lead us is to restore our belief in our own guidance. – Henry Miller (1891-1980), The Wisdom of the Heart, 1941

826. I see men ordinarily more eager to discover a reason for things than to find out whether things are so. – Michel de Montaigne (1532-1592), Essays

827. There is no crueler tyranny that that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice. – Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), The Spirit of the Laws, 1748

828. You have not converted a man because you have silenced him. – John Morley (1838-1923), Critical Miscellanies

829. In any free society, the conflict between social conformity and individual liberty is permanent, unresolvable, and necessary. – Kathleen Norris

830. The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm. – P. D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), A New Model of the Universe, 1931

831. A good end cannot sanctify evil means; nor must we ever do evil, that good may come of it. – William Penn (1644-1718), Some Fruits of Solitude in Reflections and Maxims

832. No free people can lose their liberties while they are jealous of liberty. But the liberties of the freest people are in danger when they set up symbols of liberty as fetishes, worshipping the symbol instead of the principle it represents. – Wendell Phillips (1811-1884), in Liberty and the Great Libertarians (C. Spradling)

833. A lawyer with a briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns. – Mario Puzo, The Godfather

834. If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own. If in other lands the press and books and literature of all kinds are censored, we must redouble our efforts here to keep them free. If in other lands the eternal truths of the past are threatened by intolerance, we must provide a safe place for their perception. – Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), U.S. President, Speech, 6/30/38

835. One evening, when I was yet in my nurse’s arms, I wanted to touch the tea urn, which was boiling merrily … My nurse would have taken me away from the urn, but my mother said “Let him touch it.” So I touched it – and that was my first lesson in the meaning of liberty. – John Ruskin (1819-1900), The Story of Arachne, 1870

836. There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all. – Antonin Scalia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Arizona v. Hicks, 3/3/87

837. There is no “slippery slope” toward loss of liberty, only a long staircase where each step down must first be tolerated by the American people and their leaders. – Alan K. Simpson, U.S. Senator, New York Times, 9/26/82

838. The liberty the citizen enjoys is to be measured not by governmental machinery he lives under, whether representative or other, but by the paucity of restraints it imposes upon him. – Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Social Statics, 1850

839. A man’s liberties are none the less aggressed upon because those who coerce him do so in the belief that he will be benefited. – Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Social Statics, 1850

840. The right to defy an unconstitutional statute is basic in our scheme. Even when an ordinance requires a permit to make a speech, to deliver a sermon, to picket, to parade, or to assemble, it need not be honored when it’s invalid on its face. – Potter Stewart (1915-1985), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Walker v. Birmingham, 1967

842. Men love liberty because it protects them from control and humiliation by others, thus affording them the possibility of dignity; they loathe liberty because it throws them back on their own abilities and resources, thus confronting them with the possibility of insignificance. – Thomas Szasz, The Untamed Tongue, 1990

843. Constitutions are checks upon the hasty action of the majority. They are the self-imposed restraints of a whole people upon a majority of them to secure sober action and a respect for the rights of the minority. – William Howard Taft (1857-1930), U.S. President, Veto Message, Arizona Enabling Act, 1911

844. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than any [constitutional] provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. – Roger B. Taney (1777-1864), U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ex parte Milligan, 1866

845. Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law. – Clarence Thomas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

846. I don’t believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights. – Clarence Thomas, U.S. Supreme Court Justice

847. There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have. – Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), U.S. President, Message, Veto of the McCarran Act, 9/22/50

848. Whenever you have an efficient government you have a dictatorship. – Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), U.S. President, Speech, Columbia University, 4/28/59

849. From the utopian viewpoint, the United States constitution is a singularly hard-bitten and cautious document, for it breathes the spirit of skepticism about human altruism and incorporates a complex system of checks, balances and restrictions, so that everybody is holding the reins on everybody else. – Chad Walsh, From Utopia to Nightmare, 1962

850. But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become selfserving busybodies. – Alan Watts (1915-1973), Tao: The Watercourse Way, 1975

853. The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem. – Milton Friedman

854. Ninety eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hardworking, honest Americans. It’s the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then, we elected them. – Lily Tomlin

855. The object and practice of liberty lies in the limitation of governmental power. – General Douglas MacArthur

856. The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments. – U.S. Senator William Borah

857. When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare. – Howard Kershner

858. To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. . .I place economy among the first and most important of republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared. – President Thomas Jefferson

859. The history of liberty is the history of limitations on the power of government, not the increase of it. When we resist, therefore, the concentration of power, we are resisting the processes of death, because concentration of power is what always precedes the destruction of human liberties. – President Woodrow Wilson

860. The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax. – Albert Einstein, scientist

861. When more of the people’s sustenance is exacted through the form of taxation than is necessary to meet the just obligations of government and expenses of its economical administration, such exaction becomes ruthless extortion and a violation of the fundamental principles of a free government. – President Grover Cleveland

862. It would be thought a hard government that should tax its people one tenth part. – Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father

863. Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery. – President Calvin Coolidge

864. Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it. – Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist

866. Form 1040 was chosen by the IRS because for every $50 you earn, you get 10 and they get 40. – Jay Leno

867. The War on Drugs is a price support system for terrorists and drug pushers. It turns ordinary, cheap plants like marijuana and poppies into fantastically lucrative black market products. Without the War on Drugs, the financial engine that fuels terrorist organizations would sputter to a halt. – Ron Crickenberger, Libertarian Party Political Director 2/4/02

868. Whenever there is some trouble in any area of the economy, the simplest solution to many people is “Let the government fix it.” Yet … every time the government uses its money or its power to favor this group or that … the net result is such a web of supports, subsidies, interventions and controls that it is almost impossible for a nation to find its way back into a dynamic system of really free enterprise. – Lawrence Fertig

869. More worrisome is the notion that our civil liberties are subject to cancellation in times of crisis. Our Constitution seeks to protect rights the Framers deemed inalienable. It faces its gravest tests in times of crisis. – Clint Bolick Reason Magazine, 12/02

870. I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence “democracy,” and the other, “tyranny.” – Karl Popper

871. The politicians don’t just want your money. They want your soul. They want you to be worn down by taxes until you are dependent and helpless. – James Dale Davidson, National Taxpayers Union

872. The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences, was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism … – U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Davis, Ex Parte Milligan (1866)

873. Libertarianism is the philosophy which says that you can run your life better than the government can, and you have the right to be left alone in order to do it. – Anonymous

874. There once was a man from Nantucket,
Who wanted to sell me a bucket,
But he could not, because,
There were too many laws,
So he threw up his hands and said, “Vote Libertarian!”

Anonymous

875. Asking liberals where wages and prices come from is like asking six-year-olds where babies come from. – Thomas Sowell

876. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. – George Orwell

877. Gun registration is a gateway drug. – Mark Gilmore

878. Those who beat their swords into plough shares shall plough for those who don’t. – Anonymous

879. Letting lawyers make laws is like letting doctors make diseases. – Anonymous

880. Legalize Freedom: Vote Libertarian. – Anonymous

881. The Constitution is the Contract with America. – Anonymous

882. There may be two libertarians in the world who agree on absolutely everything, but I am not one of them. – Anonymous

883. My freedom is more important than your great idea. – Anonymous

884. If 50 million people say a stupid thing, it’s still a stupid thing.– David Severn

885. As the growing emphasis on feelings crowds out reason, facts will play a smaller role in public discourse. – Paul Craig Roberts

886. Democrats can never get any sleep because they are afraid somebody somewhere is making too much money. Republicans can never get any sleep because they are afraid somebody somewhere is having too much fun. – Anonymous

887. In a democracy, two wolves and a sheep take a majority vote on what’s for supper. In a constitutional republic, the wolves are forbidden on voting on what’s for supper, and the sheep are well armed. – Anonymous

888. … the American Colonists under King George III had it pretty good compared to us. They would wonder why we haven’t taken up arms and seceded yet. – Lew Goldberg

889. The Constitution poses no threat to our current form of government. – Joseph Sobran

890. Anything called a “program” is unconstitutional. – Joseph Sobran

891. How about a chip for everyone, either in their right hand or in their forehead, to make sure no one gets away with anything? Problem is … while “they” are keeping track of us, who will be keeping track of “them”? – Cheryl DeJesus

892. Control’s real name is bondage. The logical conclusion would be, if giving up some rights produces a better society, then by giving up all our rights we could produce a perfect society. – Citizens’ Rule Book

893. The poorest man may, in his cottage, bid defiance to all the forces of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storm may enter; the rain may enter; but the King of England may not enter; all his force dares not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement. – William Pitt

894. The American people will never knowingly adopt socialism, but under the name of liberalism, they will adopt every fragment of the socialist program until one day America will be a socialist nation without ever knowing how it happened. – Norman Thomas

895. The Ten “Cannots” of Political Economy:
1. You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
2. You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
3. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men.
4. You cannot help the wage-earner by tearing down the wage-payer.
5. You cannot further the brotherhood of mankind by encouraging class hatred.
6. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
7. You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
8. You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than you earn.
9 . You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative.
10. You cannot help man permanently by doing for them what they could do and should do for themselves.

896. Our Constitution is not a body of law to govern the people; it was formulated to govern the government, to make government the servant and not the master of the people. – William F. Jasper

897. Six Miracles of Socialism:
1. There is no unemployment, but no one works.
2. No one works, but everyone gets paid.
3. Everyone gets paid, but there is nothing to buy with the money.
4. No one can buy anything, but everyone owns everything.
5. Everyone owns everything, but no one is satisfied.
6. No one is satisfied, but 99 percent of the people vote for the system. – Anonymous

899. Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. – Frederic Bastiat

900. The Five Iron Laws of Big Government:

1. Big Government doesn’t work.

2. Big Government makes things worse, often hurting the very people it is intended to help.

That’s why we must make government small! – Small Government Act to End the Income Tax in Massachusetts 02/06/2002

901. Always behave like a duck – keep calm and unruffled on the surface but paddle like the devil underneath. – Jacob Braude

902. In order to prevent democracy from becoming a tyranny over minorities, individual rights must supersede all democratic voting and all regulations. Rights must come first. Laws should come second, and only to protect those rights; nothing more. – Stuart K. Hayashi

903. Not in government or force, not in slavery or war, but in the creative, and thereby spiritual, power of freedom, shall our inspiration be found. – F.A. Harper, founder Institute for Humane Studies

904. Giving a politician access to your wallet is like giving a dog access to your refrigerator. – Tim Barber

905. Everyone wants to save the planet but no one wants to help Mom clean the dishes.” – P.J. O’Rourke, in All the Trouble in the World

907. It is a besetting vice of democracies to substitute public opinion for law. This is the usual form in which masses of men exhibit their tyranny. – James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, 1838

908. Choose loss rather than shameful gains. – Greek proverb

909. A vote is “wasted” when someone fails to vote their conscience. – Jesse Ventura

910. I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and of human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House – with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone. – John Kennedy, 1962 dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners

911. Each and every time someone says “there ought to be a law” they are saying that men with guns should enforce their will on innocent others. – Michael Barnett

914. Political correctness is tyranny with manners. – Charlton Heston, speaking before the Arizona State Legislature

915. The whole of economics can be reduced to a single lesson, and that lesson can be reduced to a single sentence. The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups. – Henry Hazlitt in Economics in One Lesson

916. The Second Amendment is the Equal Rights Amendment. – Jannalee Tobias

917. My reading of history convinces me that most bad government results from too much government. – Thomas Jefferson.

918. The average American family head will be forced to do twenty years’ labor to pay taxes in his or her lifetime. – James Bovard, Lost Rights

919. There’s nothing that does so much harm as good intentions. – Dr. Milton Friedman, as interviewed in “Is America No. 1?” by John Stossel.

920. It’s illegal to say to a voter “Here’s $100, vote for me.” So what do the politicians do? They offer the $100 in the form of Health Care, Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Food Stamps, tobacco subsidies, grain payments, NEA payments, and jobs programs. – Don Farrar – average guy, age 51

921. Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demand for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen. – Ayn Rand

922. If workers struggle for higher wages, this is hailed as “social gains”, if businessmen struggle for higher profits, this is damned as “selfish greed”. – Ayn Rand

923. Capitalism has created the highest standard of living ever known on earth. The evidence is incontrovertible. The contrast between West and East Berlin is the latest demonstration, like a laboratory experiment for all to see. Yet those who are loudest in proclaiming their desire to eliminate poverty are loudest in denouncing capitalism. Man’s well-being is not their goal. – Ayn Rand, Theory and Practice

924. It is a free market that makes monopolies impossible. – Ayn Rand

925. Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other. – Oscar Ameringer

926. Freedom is nothing else but a chance to be better. – Albert Camus

927. The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. – Winston Churchill

928. Jury: Twelve people who determine which client has the better lawyer. – Robert Frost

929. Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. – Mahatma Gandhi

930. The public interest is best served by the free exchange of ideas. – John Kane

931. Politics is the means by which the will of the few becomes the will of the many. – Howard Koch

932. Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions — it only guarantees equality of opportunity. – Irving Kristol

933. In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule. – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

934. Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian. – Robert Orben

935. Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell 1984

936. Every nation ridicules other nations — and all are right. – Arthur Schopenhauer

937. Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed. – I. F. Stone

938. It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them. – Alfred Adler

939. My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. – Ashleigh Brilliant

940. A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is statistics. – Josef Stalin

941. The direct use of force is such a poor solution to any problem, it is generally employed only by small children and large nations. – David Friedman

942. You should never wear your best trousers when you go out to fight for freedom and liberty. – Henrik Ibsen

943. Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons. – Bertrand Russell

944. When the rich make war it’s the poor that die. – Jean-Paul Sartre

945. Remember, to them it is us who are the enemy. – N. F. Simpson

946. Draft beer, not people. – Anonymous

947. It seems like the less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag. – Anonymous

948. Why bother building any more nuclear warheads until we’ve used the ones we have? – Anonymous

949. Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom. – John F. Kennedy

950. You [should] not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harm it would cause if improperly administered – Lyndon Johnson, former President of the U.S.

951. The people cannot delegate to government the power to do anything which would be unlawful for them to do themselves. – John Locke, “A Treatise Concerning Civil Government”

952. Don’t ever think you know what’s right for the other person. He might start thinking he knows what’s right for you. – Paul Williams, “Das Energi”

953. America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards. – Claire Wolfe

954. Since there is no such entity as “the public,” since the public is merely a number of individuals, the idea that “the public interest” supersedes private interests and rights can have but one meaning: that the interests and rights of some individuals take precedence over the interests and rights of others. – Ayn Rand

955. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” – Dosteovsky’s Grand Inquisitor

956. Since outright slavery has been discredited, “democracy” is the only remaining rationale for state compulsion that most people will accept. – Joseph Sobran in The Myth of ‘Limited Government’

957. Democracy has proved only that the best way to gain power over people is to assure the people that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves. – Joseph Sobran in The Myth of ‘Limited Government’

958. To entrust the government with the power of determining the education which our children receive is entrusting our servant with the power to be our master. – David Nasaw

959. Enjoy yourself. It’s later than you think. – Chinese proverb

960. The common denominator in all government activity is the use of force: Government either forces you to do things, forces you not to do things, or forces you to pay for things. – Doug Newman

961. Our current philosophy of government may be summarized six words: If it sounds good, do it. – Doug Newman

962. All the fiery rhetoric of the Founders was directed at a “tyrant” who taxed his subjects at a rate of about three percent. Today, we in “the land of the free” are taxed at about 50 percent when you add federal, state, and local taxes. What kind of government would do this? A dictatorship would. – Doug Newman

963. Electing even a few Libertarians to a governing board, is akin to having a designated driver in a roomful of drunks. – Doug Klippel, LP County Chair, Jacksonville, FL

964. If the government can’t keep drugs away from inmates who are locked in steel cages, surrounded by barbed wire, watched by armed guards, drug-tested, strip-searched, X-rayed, and videotaped – how can it possibly stop the flow of drugs to an entire nation? – Ron Crickenberger

965. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. – Manifesto of the Communist Party – Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

966. If we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. – Winston Churchill

967. The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas. – Linus Pauling

968. Mystical references to “society” and its programs to “help” may warm the hearts of the gullible, but what it really means is putting more power in the hands of bureaucrats. – Thomas Sowell

969. We don’t have a budget crisis. We have a spending crisis. – Jonathan Hill, Citizens for a Sound Economy

970. Make happy those who are near, and those who are far will come. – Chinese proverb

971. There is a word sweeter than mother, home or heaven. That word is liberty. – Epitaph of Matilda Joslyn Gage, suffragist and abolitionist (1826-1898)

972. We are here on earth to do good for others. What the others are here for, I don’t know. – W. H. Auden

973. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. – Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

974. The right to do something does not mean that doing it is right. – William Safire

975. Truth is not determined by majority vote. – Doug Gwyn

976. If you can’t answer a man’s argument, all is not lost; you can still call him vile names. – Elbert Hubbard

977. If you live in a country run by committee, be on the committee. – Graham Summer

978. Before you criticize people, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’ve got a mile-long head start. And you have their shoes. – The Lion

979. When facing a difficult task, act as though it is impossible to fail. If you’re going after Moby Dick, take along the tartar sauce. – Life’s Little Instruction Book

980. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing. – Theodore Roosevelt

981. Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. – Galbraith’s Law

982. If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. – Isaac Newton

985. After each war there is a little less democracy to save. – Brooks Atkinson

986. Individuality is the aim of political liberty. By leaving the citizen as much freedom of action and of being as comports with order and the rights of others, the institutions render him truly a freeman. He is left to pursue his means of happiness in his own manner. – James Fenimore Cooper, American author, 1789-1851

987. War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means. – Carl von Clausewitz

988. There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism — by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide. – Ayn Rand, LA Times, 9/2/62

989. Laws that forbid the carrying of arms, disarm only those who are neither inclined, nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants. They serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. – Thomas Jefferson, 1764

990. If you have ever seen a four-year-old trying to lord it over a two-year-old, then you know what the basic problem of human nature is – and why government keeps growing larger and ever more intrusive. – Thomas Sowell

991. There are many paths to libertarianism. Many reasons for becoming a libertarian. Ethical: Embracing the “Non-Aggression Principle”. Opposition to the use of force. Pragmatic: Freedom works. Freedom is practical and effective and efficient. Utilitarian: Freedom provides the greatest good for the greatest number. Egoistic: Freedom benefits you. Freedom is in your self-interest. Altruistic: Freedom benefits others. Freedom is in their interest. Outcome: Freedom produces results that you want. It maximizes individual choice. Freedom promotes and rewards personal responsibility. Freedom creates prosperity. – Michael Cloud

992. We suffer most when the White House busts with ideas. – H.L. Mencken

993. Property rights are not the rights of property; they are the rights of humans with regard to property. They are a particular kind of human right. – David Friedman

994. The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. – James Madison (1751-1836)

995. It is better to correct your own faults than those of another. – Democritus

996. In most instances, all an argument proves is that two people are present. – Tony Petito

997. [Statists] believe that government should make decisions for individuals. Since individuals usually prefer to make their own decisions, coercion and compulsion become necessary correctives. – Theodore Forstmann (From remarks delivered during the 1997 Shavano Institute for National Leadership)

998. Answer fools with silence. – Iranian Proverb

999. Democracy says it is acceptable to take money or property from a nonconsenting individual because he is outnumbered. – Unknown

1000. Isn’t it about time we found Congress in contempt of The People? – Anonymous